Since its inception as a nation state from 1970 onwards, Oman’s expanding heritage industry and market for crafts and sites – exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the restoration of more than a hundred forts, castles and citadels – fashions a distinctly national geography and a territorial imaginary. Material forms - ranging from old mosques and shari’a manuscripts to restored forts now museumified, old living settlements, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger (khanjar) and archaeological landscapes - saturate the landscape and become increasingly ubiquitous as part of a public and visual memorialization of the past. Material forms, and their circulation through institutional techniques of education and mass publicity assume a repetitive aesthetic pedagogy that cultivate every-day civic virtues, new modes of religiosity and forms of marking time, defining the ethical actions necessary to becoming an Omani modern through the framework of tradition. I argue that this is not a matter of merely instilling uniformity of behaviour but of creating the ethical conditions in which a modern public domain for creativity and deliberation can be created. I explore how the realm of heritage is approached not merely in its ability to instil ideologies, thus downgrading its truth to a function of state power and manipulation, but in its potential to shape the perceptual habits, emotional affects and ethical sensibilities of its audience.